In weaving of repeating patterned fabrics in the textile industry, particularly those fabrics woven with heavier denier yarns for use as upholstery fabrics and the like, shuttleless looms have become increasingly popular. Shuttleless looms used for these fabrics normally include rapier means for inserting picks of selected ones of a plurality of filling yarns into the fabric, a filling yarn pattern control means for selectively presenting desired filling yarns at predetermined intervals at the feed-in side of the loom to the rapier means in accordance with the desired repeating pattern of the fabric, cutter means on the feed-in side of the loom for cutting the selected filling yarn when received by the rapier means so that the rapier means inserts a free end of the selected filling yarn, and selvage trimming means for trimming the loose filling yarns extending outwardly from the woven fabric as the fabric is fed forwardly in the loom. Such a loom of the rigid double-rapier type is manufactured and sold by Lindauer Dornier Gesellschaft GmbH of Lindau Bodensee, West Germany.
In this type of shuttleless loom, a false selvage is woven on each side of the fabric with a skip-dent area in which the warp yarns are omitted separating the normal selvage edges of the fabric and the false selvages on each side of the fabric. These false selvage portions hold the loose filling yarns extending outwardly from the normal selvage edges of the woven fabric in position for cutting thereof in the skip-dent area of the fabric by the selvage trimming means and holds the cut ends of those filling yarns on the feed-in side of the loom for which a repeat pattern has not yet been called for in the repeating pattern of the fabric after cutting thereof by the selvage trimming means so that these filling yarns are held under tension and do not back up through the filling yarn pattern control means. These false selvages, after being cut by the selvage trimming means and after performing the above functions, were discarded as waste.
Manifestly, the excess length of filling yarns along with the extra ends of warp yarns required for weaving such false selvages increased the cost of the woven fabric and limited the effective width for which the resulting fabric could be woven on a particular loom.